Lilacs Out of the Dead Land
by mayhit
Summary: Our persuits become our habits.


Title: Lilacs Out of the Dead Land

Author: Amyhit

Spoilers: …none? Maybe something really vague

Rating: light R

Disclaimer: I only wish

Summary: Our pursuits become our habits.

Author's notes: So this is my first X-Files fiction. I've only viewed the first four seasons and if anything content-wise is fucked up, that's why. I don't have an editor. I doubt I really have the characters voices down yet. In regards to timeline, I am leaving that ultimately up to the reader, though there are some smatterings of implications. Whatever suits you.

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I._Buried life and Paris in the spring._

Mulder sits beside you on the plane back to Washington humming 'It Never Rains In California'. You've conducted seven autopsies in as many days and it's starting to seem that the only time your hands stop shaking is when they are cutting into something's cold little rib cage. The plane rattles on takeoff. You order a coffee and curl your hands around it like a neck. Everything reminds you of Mulder.

Mulder sits beside you, damp from the dash you two made from the car dealership to the airport. Lariat, for sinister and unknowable reasons, had decided it would be best to set up shop an inconvenient quarter mile from LAX, rather than making itself available within the vicinity. You and Mulder had both frequently agreed how ridiculous it was to catch a cab for only two and a half blocks but today it was raining and you had spiked a fever that you weren't telling him about. You both broke down and were planning to flag over the nearest available Taxi when Mulder began talking… A minute of unfruitful curb waving later and he was still rambling about how Milton wrote on Pigmies in 'Paradise Lost' and nobody was calling _him_ a lunatic. Yes, but Milton was by no means attempting to persuade the residence of Beta Kappa Phi that their yard was being annually strewn with dead birds due to an age old war waged between the flocks and the Pigmies. Pigmies – you'd spent the last three days listening to Mulder explain – were small; about thirteen inches, rather like Lilliputians.

Mulder, you said. You were standing in a puddle with a bitten fibula and it all struck you as nothing but par for the course. _Mulder_, you said. He wouldn't shut up.

You think you were just too bruised and exhausted to hear it. You lifted your suitcase and turned away from him, into the storm.

By the time you got to the airport you both looked sorry like a lotto 6-49 Extra commercial and your foot was bleeding a little through a hole in your nylons. The airport was crowded with hurrying people awash in their business suits and everyone was shaking out newspapers or noisy damp umbrellas. Neither of you had a newspaper or an umbrella. You ended up sopping wet and packed into the gate-line. You found you were pressed close enough against his chest that you could feel each other shivering.

On the plane you think about the airport and how those huge glass doors have been scaring you lately, but it's nothing you can explain. Even with the rain, Mulder is warm beside you and you're cold but haven't made it a point to notice yet. His eyes are so wide. His face is visible reflected in the glass, sharp around the edges with the adrenergic hackles he hasn't calmed down enough yet to finger-comb. You wonder sometimes if he watches for UFO's out there. Even in this low sky it still feels like the place they'd be.

You have never cared for the window seat on flights, but then you'd never flown in a plane until midway through university. Your father had always been distrustful of the sky. "It might be where we're going, Starbuck," he told you once or twice, "but it sure as hell isn't where we came from," and the low quinine edge of his voice was enough to keep your feet on the ground for another few years. Either way, Mulder always takes the window seat and leaves you with the aisle as though he knows exactly what a clear view stirs up in your skeptical little head.

It's a long flight really, from California to Washington and usually you rely on the warm weight of a laptop to keep your mind on your work. Today though, you sit silently in your economy-class seat, cloistered and pale as old soap. You think if Mulder dares to breath the word 'pigmie' again, or if he so much as inquires on your theory as to how all those cranes ended up slaughtered, you'll drag him into the bathroom and use his own handcuffs to lock him to the railing by the toilet. Instead he's his own kind of quiet though, just like a brilliant eight-year-old with a riddle. You manage to fit seven answers into a crossword puzzle thinking about nothing accept the way the Pacific Ocean smells: different than the Atlantic and less hateful.

If you spend long enough around any body of salt water you will start to think about your father. The sight of him flat against the horizon, so far away he could be leaving or coming towards you and you wouldn't know. He used to listen to classical music the night before he was scheduled to set sail. It was strange and romantic; he was usually such a philistine. He would drink his scotch and listen very hard to the fugues and the accelerandos and you would observe all this until it was time to go to bed. The morning after, you would stand there with your feet on the sandy dock. It had always felt, to you, like a symphony- the orchestral ache of something in your chest tearing loose as he boarded and was suddenly gone. It was the way you would swallow and forbid yourself to miss him. It was sotto voce in your young mind for those years, a private and heavy undertaking that you would not miss him, nor would you be angry with him for leaving.

Your mother stood beside you smoking her cigarettes and exhaling them into the wind. Melissa would be on the beach picking up clams. She showed you how to hold them still until they opened in your hand like a single wary eye and you showed her how to throw rocks, hard into the sea, like Charlie and Bill. The whole time the waves slapped tachycardiacly against old wood. Waves your father had crested only a moment ago, like the way you imagine Prufrock, far out in the surf among the wreathed sea girls.

Melissa cried sometimes when your father was sailing on the very curve of the horizon. You stood near her, crouching on the sand and feeling your own sobs held so silent in your chest – your heart trying to shut itself like a clam ripped partly in half. Later you learned about the Superior Vena Cava and what 'left ventricle' meant and that a broken heart meant nothing but a sadness that enisled its sufferer. The things that sometimes broke inside The Body had nothing to do with that. The Heart was a muscle, was the size of a small mango; was lethal as a blush if it ever stopped. By that time you were seventeen years old, sitting on your parents roof with your own pack of cigarettes, hating your dad and staring at the sky.

After the plane meets altitude Mulder reaches across you. He dabs away the moisture along your jaw using the cuff of his suit. The buttons on his sleeves are undone and you can feel them catch- little saucers. You find you have to fight to swallow down the shivers in your throat like sea spines.

The two of you are 6 miles above 'The Golden State' but the plane cabin is grey. You look at Mulder sideways- the sunflower seeds you know he's wishing he had and that shut oyster-shell mouth of his. This plane feels higher in the sky that it should be. You're sweating even though you can't remember the last time your hands were warm. You're probably fucking up your manicure on the armrest too.

When your plane meets altitude Mulder reaches across you. You shrink away from his touch, of course, but he shrinks into yours in return and curves your face towards the window, towards him. From him, this is nothing you expected but it's nothing you didn't and you allow him to do this. He's intent upon you like you're a spoon he's bending with his mind and you can't honestly say it isn't like that for you too. You stare out the window at a sky as dark as the ocean.

He unbuttons your suit first; does it easily with one hand. His suit is already so dry you figure he must have fortified it with Scotch-Guard like an acropolis. Your own suit though, is dripping from the sleeves and as soon as the air hits your ribs you begin to shiver violently. The top button of your pale blouse is next on Mulder's list of things to mess with but you can't pretend the view is that transfixing so you quickly do the job with your own cold fingers. The harder you try to stop shivering the more you seem to tremble and it's the first heat you feel in days, to be angry with yourself.

You need to get dry, Mulder says and helps you to slip your suit coat off your shoulders. It's an awkward interaction in the confines of your seating arrangement. The fabric of your blouse is damp and diaphanous. You feel Mulder's fingers splay briefly against your back as he pulls the blazer from behind you. Then he's folding the heavy fabric over the backs of your chairs and he's talking about the difference in height between a dwarf and a pigmie the entire time.

Later the two of you are watching Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure without the headphones plugged in. You and Mulder on a plane, quietly eating pretzels as though you weren't still shivering madly and he didn't want to put his mouth against you everywhere, just to warm you up.

You think it's strange. The ocean is almost all you can remember of your father. Also, that everything reminds you of Mulder but nothing reminds you of you.

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II._Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you._

The Bureau sends you on vacation. You expect as much really, what with the highly memorable weekend you yourself spent in Philadelphia while Mulder went searching for his inner hound-dog. Mulder, though, gets a look like a sulking puppy about it and retreats behind his desk to get his nose back into joint. You're standing in your high heels in the basement doorway. You pretend to Mulder that you're going to spend a week at your mother's house making home baked lasagna.

You figure you can hole up and thirstily re-read the Shelly's and Melville for most of Tuesday; you have a bunch of exploratory reports on cytokine storms you've been hoping to have time for; then some stuff on the internet about Ericksonian hypnosis you're trying to be open minded about. If you keep busy you won't even have to stop by confession. Meanwhile Mulder is saying something about a stakeout and the boredom of early hours radio when there's no one to share it with. His tone is flippant. You pretend you're not pissed off at him for wanting to keep you, and that your throat doesn't ache when he looks at you that way.

Ten minutes later you're sitting in your car in the parking lot, inhaling hard on a cigarette like you're trying to breath through a straw without suffocating. The last time you felt this avaricious burn was in Comity and it occurs to you now that you've never really broken a habit. You make up for it though, by being so damn good at suppressing them.

It's only nine in the morning and only April but your car swelters with the door shut. You think about how the basement has a sound- water and metal under ground, conspiracy under ground -the way neither of you can ever seem to touch each other in natural light, and how you've begun needing to hear things that echo in order to feel calm. You throw your suit coat aggressively into the passenger seat like you've taken a hostage. A moment later you peel out of the parking lot hard enough it almost feels as though you've managed to leave the Hoover building back there, eating dust.

On the radio, Paul Whatever-his-name-is forecasts summer temperatures all week, Queen riffs on Galileo; there are birds in the hot sky as you speed towards home. Your throat still aches so you light another cigarette, cancer be damned. Sometimes this rich science you and Mulder have stumbled into just curls in you like a fractal. A hundred thousand things you can feel but can't touch, and him.

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III._The corners of the evening, the pools that stand in drains._

You wake up on your couch, still in your work clothes. The phone is ringing. It's loud in the heat of the apartment. By the time you've got a toothbrush in your mouth it's stopped ringing. You take a shaking breath in through your nose and spit and spit, trying to feel better.

Your skin is grainy with sweat under the nylons you're somehow still wearing, so you take a shower. Then you pull on some sweatpants and begin cleaning your fridge. You find a decomposing head of cabbage in your crisper and in the strange afternoon light it looks like an alien head in a bag. The neighbor's parrot has been talking all day.

Sitting on your kitchen floor you can hear the neighbor's bed banging against the wall behind the cupboards. They're agreeing with each other emphatically.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Mr. Next Door Neighbor is a professional bird photographer and from the differences in vocal ranges you've managed to deduce the existence of at least three separate species of bird in residence beside you.

Yes! Yes! Yes! affirms Mrs. Next Door Neighbor and the words repeat oddly-

Yesyesyes –in a bird warble.

You close your eyes momentarily against the heat and the smell of sweating compost from the fridge. When you open them again the banging next door has stopped and the head of cabbage is just a head of cabbage in a bag.

Your mother calls later while you're cleaning the closet in the guest bedroom. You can tell it's her because she always rings exactly six times before hanging up. The shade in the guest bedroom is almost enough to keep your shirt from sticking to your back so you stay there for a few hours, padding back and forth from the bed to the closet. By dusk you've unearthed a bunch of old board games you seem to recall having made up drinking rules for in university. You take them out carefully, autopsy the pieces, and with each box the must and the dented edges push your breath far back into your throat.

In university you and Connie Summers used to share swigs from a mickey of Fireball whisky and sit high up in the campus bleachers on rainy nights. The two of you would talk about her obsession with her Psych Teacher and your obsession with Einstein, and laugh. In university you used to cross yourself before you went to bed, even if you were sleeping in a boys dorm room, with a boy. In university there were no such things as aliens.

You fall asleep early and exhausted in the guest bedroom. By this point you figure you'll sleep anywhere but your own bed. The room is a gloaming oven and it's enough to keep you sedated and fitful for hours.

When you met him he was so self-deprecating, Mulder. The FBI's most unwanted with his bad-boy stubble and his haphazardly handsome suits. He was brilliant and he wasn't afraid of you because you were small, like so many men were. Mulder stared down your sharp little nose at you as though he wanted to shake you up. Or kiss you. Or both.

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IV._Shanti, shanti, shanti._

You wake up because the parrot next door is talking again. Mon-ster, says the bird as though it knows what you were dreaming, Mon-ster.

You're pressed against the Trouble board game with that hard little popper bruising your thigh. It's not really morning yet and you notice that your hands still smell of the celery you cleaned from your crisper yesterday.

You can't seem to slow your heartbeat in the dark so you get up and head for the living room. You cook some eggs, eat them with the lights off and end up throwing them up with the lights off too. You wash your face afterwards and it's dark enough that the tiredness around your eyes doesn't show in the mirror. You're about to go for a run when the phone rings for a third time. This is Mulder, you know. He's the only one who would call you before six AM and the only one who would let it ring fifteen times before giving up.

You take the stairs down from your apartment. The stairwell has the echo you need in order to feel calm and the exit signs follow you out. You think about where you keep your shoes now, since the truth began to sprout oddities that wake you up at night. You keep them beside the place you're sleeping, most often, instead of in the closet by the door. The other night wasn't the first time you've slept in your clothes either. It's happening often these days. Either that or you wake up shaking for a breath and feeling vulnerable in your silk camisole, polyester sweatpants, bare feet. Mulder sleeps on his couch in his clothes and if he dreams about his missing baby sister he never lets you see it when he wakes. He stands when you enter his apartment and the two of you rush out the door without feeding his fish. Sometimes the fish die. Sometimes you hate Mulder for being the one who's assimilating you and not the other way around. Sometimes you have night terrors that wake you and your heart beats so fast in the dark that you can't help but believe in every alien you're denying.

It's your third day off and you pound the hell out of six pavement miles. You run until it's long been light out and you've passed at least two parks you don't remember seeing before. Then you go home and stand in the shower with your legs shaking. It feels so good you have to bite your lip to keep from sobbing or laughing with the abandon the endorphins afford. The water runs lukewarm before you feel safe to get out. Then you call Bill and you call your Mom and your lungs burn all afternoon. This is your vacation. This is your life.

Sometimes you forget the people who called you Dana for all those years. Sometimes you just can't sleep unless your shoes are waiting a foot and a half from where your feet are.

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V._She smoothes her hair with automatic hand, and puts a record on the gramophone._

Your fourth morning off you sleep in late and dream of loud noises. When you wake the sun is shining in through your window and your face is hot under a glass sky. The rest of your room, by contrast, is in shadow.

The first thing you do once standing is trip over your Stuart Weitzman pumps. You fall against a dresser on your way to the floor and a minute later you're staring at the two hundred dollar shoes you've just impulsively shoved into the bathroom garbage can. You look down and you're bleeding on the air vent. There's an ambulance, off somewhere, red and blue and blaring. You sit on the toilet with the lid down, disinfecting your knee. After a moment the sob of the siren continues to rise and fall in your humid apartment. It's a sound you know well. Well enough to predict that the ambulance isn't moving anymore and that it's close by and that you probably have a dead neighbor.

You stand in the kitchen over a pot of boiling water. On the pavement below your apartment window there's a dead dog, jumbled from the fall. Also, jumbled because of the way Elanor Brontel landed with the dog in her arms. The paramedics are out there getting the finger from the people in their cars because the road is closed. It's still covered in wet little splinters of Elanor. You stare into the metal pot on your stove and listen to the ossified sound of eggs tapping around in the boil. You already know that anything you eat isn't going to stay down right now, but the element is red-hot and a moment later you're eating eggs with coffee and not really tasting any of it.

After the run you took yesterday those old sneakers feel like they belong on your feet. You find the address of the Neiman Marcus in the yellow pages and decide not to drive. Ten minutes later a cab pulls up to the curb in front of your place. You run out to meet it while trying to logically deduce why it is that so many women love shoe shopping. You keep your eyes straight ahead of you while you stand on the curb. A ways away the police are ushering a hot-dog vendor out of the vicinity of where Ms. Brontel fell. People are still buying hot-dogs from him as he haggles with the cops and heaps sauerkraut on buns.

You meet Grisham later while you're sitting outside of a Starbucks. You have one brand new black high heel on and one bare foot. You don't manage to catch your paper-wrapped straw when it heads for the edge of the table. A moment later there's a man casting a dark panel over your charcoal suit and passing you a second straw.

Mind if I sit here? He says. You look around. All the other tables are occupied. He has the sleeves of his suit pushed up but not high enough for you to check him for inking. He shakes your hand, compliments your shoes, smiles like he doesn't quiet mean it but like he knows you don't either. You tell him your name is Dana. His hand is so cold when you clasp it that it shocks you and you cant help the tremor in your wrist. He smiles again, differently. You realize he's been drinking iced coffee, which is why his hands are so cold and have left yours a little damp.

You sit in the sun and drink. For a while he doesn't even introduce himself. He doesn't comment on the way you flinched at his grip either. He just lets your hand go and looks at you curiously. Don't worry, he says, but he doesn't say why or about what.

He's a nice encounter, Grisham Tahm -you think he said, with his thick pepper-dark hair and his hands that move only very little as he talks to you. He talks right to you but not the way Mulder does; he talks as though high diction were familiar but tiresome, and his voice wicks along your nervous little ganglia like a swallow of old rum. He sits comported, drinks at the pace you drink, and it doesn't take the length of your Venti Iced Americano for you to know he'd be good in bed- there are ways of telling.

Eventually your conversation gets around to abutting work. It's your fault, really, for mentioning autopsies. You already know he's some kind of lawyer, it's the Latin in his speech and the centripetal siege he's enacting on your senses.

It's a common question, isn't it? he says mildly. 'What do you do?', 'What do I do?' I'm surprised it's taken us this long to soldier around to it.

He must have spied the tension in your shoulders. He knows you're avoiding the subject – that much is certain.

You brace yourself for the question. You think, Okay, okay, and look towards the parking lot. Towards the Safeway bags tumbling around in the parking lot. Away from him.

People get a look when you tell them you're With The Bureau. It's quick, an odd arousal or contempt the men in particular always quench away. You remember the first time you saw that look it was dark and strange as seeing black oil in the Aqueous Humor and you shivered mid acquaintance as though the sky had clouded.

Grisham touches his lip with his thumb and asks instead, What _don't_ you do, Dana? It's so often the more telling answer.

The question does surprise you a little- the agenda of it and the oddity. You think about Mulder, the shape and the cruel phrenology of him. You think that after all the polar synchrony between you, his smell when he puts his head on top of yours, is indistinguishable from yours.

You don't leave Mulder.

With your skeptical eyebrow raised you say, Well… I very seldom find it necessary to purchase new shoes. Naturally, it's only less often that I make a male acquaintances while doing so. As it turns out, flirting is like falling off a log.

Grisham smiles further. From there it's just a matter of finishing your coffees and settling on which bar. He throws your empty coffee cup out for you while you hail another cab. Your lipstick was on the rim and when he comes back he stands beside you on the curb and holds his hand out. You see the color on him, bright as a toxic alkaloid.

Grisham takes you to a nice bar. The air is warm and the jazz is cool. It's a bar with a view so you sit by some high windows, feeling the height, a bit like fear in your spine as you drink. You look out at the city. Two birds plummet the length of a fire escape as they fight. Their mouths are open and their feathers are wild in the wind. They fall and you watch, thinking that you can't tell which wings are paired –

thinking, Mulder, and smoking one of Grisham's cigarettes.

You've finished your third drink and small talk has progressed to the odd sorts of questions no one's ever asked you before. They're the questions you didn't realize you wanted to be asked until it's the wrong person asking. Grisham's just asked you what your favorite first line for a novel is. You consider 'Call me Ishmael' but that's really only your father's favorite. Perhaps 'My soul would sing of metamorphoses' though that hardly constitutes a novel. Possibly something from Hemingway – Jake and Lady Brett and their doomed, pathetic magnetism. You'd kill for Mulder's eidetic memory just now.

The bar smells of cinnamon and butane and it's a smell that won't be coming out of your hair for a while.

I should go, you say instead of an answer but when you speak your voice is so weak you have to start again.

I should go.

He took his coat off when he sat down and when he stands to follow you out you know for almost certain he isn't concealing a firearm like you are. Why would he be?

He pays for your drinks, looks at your hair as you wait for the cab; breaths just close enough for you to feel it on the rim of your ear.

You think about Ms. Brontel- sad, sad, sad, and holding her dog to her chest on the rooftop of the building across from yours. You think you could see right into her apartment from your window most afternoons. Still, the only thing you can recall was her shadow stretching to water her plants some nights. Her tiptoes and her thin arms moving about behind the drapes made her look alien.

Grisham doesn't put his hand in the small of your back to guide you into the cab and he doesn't ask you if you would like to come back to his place. If you want to you'll say so. Like that smile of his, it's something you both already know.

In the dark back seat he puts the heel of his palm against your shoulder. His hands are still cold, this time from the gin and tonics. By contrast your shoulder is burning. His face is in the light coming in from the street; you and his hands are not. Dana, he says, low as raked leaves. Your mouth is dry and the walls of your heart feel suddenly much too thin.

You turn your face up to the low roof when his hand moves along your thigh and under your skirt. Don't worry, he says again, like he did when he first sat down in front of you at the Starbucks- you feel his fingers reach as far as they can go and brush you. His fingers are almost still. You wait but he doesn't move your panties to touch you further.

If it were recalcitrance you felt, sitting here wishing for answers that weren't also secrets, then you would move, now, and place your body against this other body. You've felt the dormant stirrings of rebellion breathing inside of you for so long – old tendencies that never aged, like a dragon coiled in a cave with smoking nostrils and half-slit eyes. This is not rebellion – Grisham's intelligent hands and the mind attached to them you just do not desire. This is, at best, apathy.

He withdraws himself long before the cab has stopped in front of your apartment. He moves to open your door for you but by the time his door is open you're already out.

Well, he says, good evening. This, like a nod from around the other side of the cab.

Yes, you say, good evening. Somewhere, already misplaced, you have his business card, which he mentions out of politeness. There's nothing else for it – nothing you can stand.

You take the elevator up to your apartment and you leave your shoes at the God damned door and you sit upright on the couch in the dark, feeling the dampness where he touched you, damp this time, not from him but from you and you remember you forgot your sneakers at the coffee shop. You think about the steam that rose against your face this morning as you boiled eggs. It's been a while since you've let anyone breathe against you and feel like that.

You think about the way you let the sales woman at Neiman Marcus earn her commission by selling you the highest heels of all the pairs you tried on. You wonder how long it will be until Mulder realizes he can't rest his chin on the part in your hair anymore. Or if he ever will.

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VII._Among the porcelain, some talk of you and me._

You wake up on your fifth day of non-terricolous living and you're back on your couch. Your lips are dry and sticky with the florid taste of the Greyhounds you consumed at the bar last night. In the kitchen you stand very still drinking a glass of water. You're listening.

Mr. Next Door Neighbor is crying in the room behind the cupboards. The sound of a man crying is something very low and quiet, mostly just the clinking of the keys in his pocket and the shifting of suit fabric but you can hear it, sometimes, when he lets out a sob with a breath.

The Next Door Neighbor's parrot is dead in its cage. Not yet, but it's hypoxic and so moribund that you catch your own breath when you see it's feathered body. Incipient death is something you're very intimate with.

The young husband comes to your door with his sweat and his sadness and stands there saying, can I-- do you-- can you help us?

There aren't many people who make the distinction between an MD and a Veterinarian. It surprised you at first; that it had taken your entire adult life to get to a place where people still thought you would know whether their dog would die from eating chocolate. Today though, you've been sitting on your couch reading Death In the Afternoon (ironic) and eating ice. You lack the energy to give a damn.

Put it on the counter, you say when you see Mr. Next Door Neighbor has the bird out in the hall behind him. You hold your door open as he wedges his way inside your apartment with his large cage.

His name's Avis, says Mr. Next Door Neighbor.

Before you see the bird you can hear something breathing at the bottom of the cage. You get closer and there it is, gasping like a fish on newspaper.

You stand in your kitchen in your bare feet and stare down at Avis. You look your neighbor in the eye when you tell him there's nothing you can do, this isn't your field, he should really go to a Veterinary clinic. You're sorry. He leans against your counter a moment with red-rimmed eyes. He looks more like a football player in his azure t-shirt and all that Good Old Boy bone structure he's slouching around in. He leaves and you drag a chair around your apartment checking your Carbon Monoxide detectors.

That night you lie awake thinking about what has to happen in order for carbon and oxygen to become desirous of each other. You think it's lascivious, really- these simple things that can kill by wanting. You sleep and dream a life in which you have no partner.

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VII._Wipe your hands across your mouth and laugh._

You spend your sixth day off breathing into fans. Your hair is mostly too short to be put in a ponytail and no matter how many bobby pins you manage to scrounge up it always winds up sticking to your damp jaw before long. Infuriated about more than you can put into words, you end up camped out on your couch wearing a headband like a teenager, smoking yet another cigarette and listening to The Rolling Stones. This leads you to throw the larger half of that pack of cigarettes behind the fridge where you wont be able to get at them. The phone doesn't ring.

You manage to swallow some salad, which is mostly cucumber because it was the only thing left in your crisper after you threw out everything that could have qualified as penicillin.

I went down to the demonstration, sings Jagger.

Without the stimulant effect of the cigarettes, you switch back over to coffee and by five o'clock you're so pent up you actually miss washing Quequeg in the sink. You miss having Mulder call you, all riled up about killer cockroaches. Eventually, you settle on flipping back and forth between a cable program about manatees and something Nova is broadcasting about ancient oil sites. As your apartment darkens it begins to sound like a muted film noire. You can't shake the feeling of listening for something- the ocean maybe, anything. His voice or the ocean.

You guess it takes six days for you to snap. You're watching static riddled TV and wearing cut-offs you found in the guest bedroom and haven't worn since university. During a commercial you start tracing the seam in your shorts from the frayed cuffs all the way up to where the legs meet in the middle. It feels odd but good.

Connie Summers' psych teacher did this to you once, just before graduation. It was May and Mr. Leander was lending you the journals of Marie Curie. You remember a window in his apartment was open. His building straddled the campus line. When he gave you the book he took your wrist in his left hand, and up that close you could see the wrinkles around his eyes. He smelled of old spice, which seemed right, and of charcoal from the barbeque he'd been fixing on his deck when you arrived. You remember you'd been stressed about finals and about the latest barbs you and your father were still fevered with from the last time you visited mom. You weren't eating well. The cut-offs were the only thing in your closet you didn't need to wear with a belt.

You remember that Mr. Leander had had you pressed against the far wall of his living room and he was kneeling in front of you. You felt his finger travel up the V between your legs and back down the other side until he had touched the skin of both your thighs. He kept his grip on your wrist the entire time and his fingers were on the spot you would hold to measure pulse. You stared out his open window at a blue sky, feeling his tongue. It was indistinguishable from your own rushing blood.

It was a short visit and you left with the book. In the hall it felt odd that neither of you had said the other's name once. You wondered what you would have called each other, had it been necessary. You got lost finding your way to the elevator and the Exit door you took out of the building was not the one you'd come in. You hadn't been off campus in a while and it felt strange standing on a deserted street, tasting your rubbed lipstick and not knowing where you were.

That was a decade ago. Now what strikes you as odd is that the denim of the article is just as bleach-white and coarse as it ever was; everything here is bleached out. Even the sky is pale. Your pulse feels like the only red thing you have.

The program on Nova returns but you're not listening. Your fingers move listlessly and you sit there trying to figure out if you usually get turned on watching documentaries about fossil fuels. Either way it scares you like mad.

That night you take a bowl of raspberries and ice to bed with you. You tell yourself it's nothing erotic- but you haven't been eating and you're feeling faint and anyway, you could certainly use the ellagitannins. It could be true.

You're shoulders have been aspiring to be earmuffs for days now and you read and re-read the same case report on the Ericksonian technique three times without effect. Finally, you put your glasses on the bedside table and begin trying to work the nervous stitches out of your musculature. There's a spot at the base of your neck that you press a hand against and it makes your pulse quicken below your jaw. You remember pointing a gun at Mulder saying, I'm not sure you're who you are, and being amazed at the authority in your own voice, how that metal weight had steadied your hand. You were so young then and 'enisled' was not yet a word you would have used to describe yourself.

You're tired, even now after almost a week off work and you can barely stand the systole and diastole pounding through your agitated body. You get the impression that if you close your eyes it won't be your own hand you'll be feeling pressed against your upper vertebrae.

Sometimes you recount as much of Greek Mythology as you can and it takes all night. Sometimes you try to remember the properties of the crystals Melissa used to keep tethered all over her body like constellations. Sometimes you get wet and tell yourself it's only excess PEA and when you sleep you dream of hands you don't remember in the morning. You could do those things now. You could.

The raspberries are cold from your freezer and they stain your hands, the fingers where you're so used to seeing blood. Your blood, a stranger's blood, Mulder's blood seeping through a hole you've just made in his shoulder, Oh God. You hold an ice cube in your mouth and in your hands and you wait for the cold to numb out this odd concupiscence.

Bill and Charlie used to have salt ice wars. You watched them taunting each other through their gritted teeth, their fists held dripping between them. You could never tell if they said the things they did to talk the other into giving up or to spur him through it.

Mulder sometimes gets this look, when the two of you are alone in 'his' office. Or it's when you're fighting about Gorgons while driving to the latest Creature of the Week. You'll be gripping the wheel of a Lariat car, run ragged with exasperation and you'll feel his smile lick at you. As though it knows you better than anyone. Narrow, petulant Mulder; he stretches out long in his seat and smiles like he knows you crave this hunting as much as he does.

You've been off work for six days and it's 75 degrees in your apartment. Your hands on your ribs leave stains from the raspberries. Finger marks on your thighs the color of the glass in a church. You breathe in and keep your eyes on the orange streetlight outside.

Abuent studia in mores.

It's four in the morning before you realize you've been touching yourself for two hours and thinking about spaceships.

-

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VIII._Like ancient women gathering fuel in vacant lots._

You wake up when the last corner of your blanket slides off the bed. The room was already murky with light when you finally fell asleep and for a moment you don't do anything accept try to figure out whether you're nauseous or just exhausted. Your clock says 7:28 but you're pretty perceptive about time- a universal invariant, after all -and it feels more like eight something. Your room is oddly cold and your windowsill is dripping rain. You left the screen in last night. This morning you can hear the low thunder of the moiling drain chutes. There is wind in your apartment for the first time in days. You curl onto your side and feel disoriented, your bare skin turning to goose flesh.

You remember last night, the early hours before you fell asleep when the only thing that felt warm in you was your throat and your groin- both of which fluttering inside of you like something's little wings. You thought it was going to be a furious white out when you finally came so you bit down hard on the bones in your hand. This morning there are marks in the flesh around the first Metacarpal. They look angry. Mulder will notice them of course, if you aren't careful to hide them, and something about that makes you feel like crying.

There was no real impending white out orgasm last night. Mostly just a hot nervous twang like a taste up through your bones, and then you lay there panting, watching the bedroom ceiling get slowly whiter. The sun was coming up, that was all.

The seventh morning of your vacation is a tired dawn, but angry and the sky is almost burgundy. Phaeton is up there somewhere in his father's carriage. You used to sneer at that one, at the story of Phaeton's blind arrogance. Now you think of his strong arms wrapped uselessly around the neck of a horse and you don't know how you feel. After all, they warned you too, again and again.

After a while you have to pee, so you get up and shut the window and your feet are cold on the bathroom floor. You sit cross-legged on your bed and do a crossword puzzle. The pen cuts out halfway through but you keep answering the questions; it's not something you can help.

Mulder calls later, while you're throwing up raspberries. Scully, he says, it's me. His voice is like water cracking over ice on the phone – something very strange and very familiar. He's talking a mile a minute about a man in Austin who is apparently attracting every pendulum in a five-mile radius. You call it a kinesiologic oddity. Mulder calls it residual radiation. You don't have to ask from what.

There's an apogee between you and Mulder that he won't acknowledge. You never returned his phone call and he doesn't ask if he woke you. It scares you that you love his negligence sometimes, even when it's towards you. Especially when it's towards you.

This morning your knees are bruised and you feel like crying or puking some more but it's Mulder in your ear and it's UFO's and it's Saving The God Damned World so you wipe your mouth and you reach for your lipstick.

Fin.

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Extended and largely unnecessary author's notes: Abuent studia in mores is Latin and translates to, 'Our pursuits become our habits'. In regards to the quotations I used, they're from various works by Eliot (T.S.) as is the title. Not terribly original, I grant you, but the man was brilliant and I couldn't help myself. Not a direct steal, but the use of fractals to represent inner mystification and confusion was inspired by Penumbra and I'd feel like a cheat if I didn't acknowledge. Feed me back, Merci.


End file.
